THE good thing about the business of opinion is you get another shot every week.

“The scene in Lahore may suggest otherwise, but Sharif’s got bigger issues than Taliban Khan to mull over,” were the last words in this space last week, 48 hours before IK triggered a political earthquake in Lahore.

Whether the earthquake will lead to a voter tsunami across Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and maybe even other parts of Pakistan will be the topic du jour for months. But let’s pause for a bit.

How did Khan pull off this most spectacular of successes?

Frankly, even within the PTI there were murmurs of concern in the run-up to Lahore. Minto Park is a vast space, big enough to swallow a crowd of twenty or thirty thousand.

Khan was popular, sure, but friends and supporters were worried he had overreached. A big crowd dwarfed by its surroundings could have slowed down or even reversed the momentum Khan had patiently built up.

Did Khan know something others in his party didn’t? Probably not. He made a high-stakes bet and won big. Of such gumption is made political success.

Khan will of course want more now. But whether or not he goes on to revitalise Pakistan, Khan has already planted his flag in a changed Pakistan. And at least two of those changes helped propel Khan to historic success at Minar-i-Pakistan.

The first is the political reawakening of the country’s educated and professional classes, dormant for the last three decades. It began with the lawyers’ movement in 2007, when ordinary Pakistanis joined the peaceful call to resistance by Aitzaz Ahsan (remember him?) and his quirky supporting cast of lawyers.

Those ordinary folks weren’t bothered by Left or Right, they weren’t driven by revolutionary zeal, they weren’t itching to transform Pakistan overnight. They were simply fed up.

Musharraf had ascended to power promising change; he ended up indistinguishable from the politicians he had heaped so much scorn on. When he tried to sabotage institutions and the constitution to prolong his stay, the educated public, the salaried class and the urban middle-class had enough.

In Chief Justice Iftikhar they found a symbol to rally behind, in Aitzaz they found a champion of all that was good and right to follow. The reawakening had begun.

It didn’t matter that the judiciary isn’t the vehicle to transform a dysfunctional polity. The previously apolitical wanted to register their protest against the manner in which the country was being run and they had found their vehicle. In vocalising their disillusionment they swelled the numbers of the politically active and partisan set who were out to replace Musharraf with their own favourites.

Fast forward to Khan and the Minar and the educated and professional classes were there to vent again. This time too they aren’t bothered by Left or Right, they aren’t worried about parliamentary math, they aren’t obsessing over the nuts and bolts of policy.

The educated folks and the professionals are simply fed up with the mess they’re seeing around them and the depressing and stale menu of existing choices: AZ and his ribald bunch of misfits; the Sharifs with their principled rhetoric but autocratic style of doing things; Kayani and his duplicitous generals.

Enter Khan, his passion and probity appealing to the values the hardworking, upright, wanting-a-fair-shake educated and professional classes care about.

Without them Khan would have still assembled thousands of party workers and the already politically inclined. With them Khan had an epic turnout.Whether the politically awakened educated and professional classes will slip back into a slumber is, like so much else about this place, hard to predict. After CJ Iftikhar’s failure, if Khan fails too, will they grow disillusioned with expressing their disillusionment so?

More certain is that the other change that has propelled Khan is here to stay and will probably keep growing in influence: the electronic media.

Khan had not been treated fairly by the media until Sunday, particularly in Punjab and Karachi (and so pretty much all over Pakistan). But as the electronic media has blanketed urban Pakistan and its message has seeped into rural Pakistan by osmosis, the impact has been profound.

Corruption, violence, injustice, malfeasance and misfeance, incompetence and negligence, wantonness, greed, unfairness — in their idiosyncratic way, the news channels have peeled back the veneer and given Pakistanis an unvarnished look at their country.

The public always had a good idea of the country they live in, but everything is closer now, more immediate. Where previously people knew which local policeman was corrupt, which local judge prone to taking a bribe, which local administrator incompetent and which local politician was ferociously padding his nest, now they know the sins of omission and commission by policemen, judges, administrators and politicians nationally.

And each night the message packaged as news all day is relentlessly pedalled as analysis: the people who claim to represent you or are paid to serve and protect you are screwing you to an extent you didn’t know and in ways you hadn’t a clue about.

The old guard and the tried-and-failed have only made it worse for themselves. From the chateau in France to ‘corruption is our right’ and from ‘a degree is a degree, whether fake or real’ to displays of unpleasantness and uncouthness, the unrepresentativeness of a system that claims to represent has burned like never before.

Rising above that miasma has been the untainted Khan, railing against a corrupt and broken system night after night, talk show after talk show. Inadvertently and with no grand design at work — remember, the electronic media hadn’t embraced Khan though it promoted the same broader message he had — the comparison between the rot of the old and the glow of the new has ceaselessly been pumped into homes across the country, changing the attitudes and perceptions of people.

So Imran Khan’s Pakistan is an already changed Pakistan. The question is, can he sustain and build on that change?

The writer is a member of staff.

cyril.a@gmail.com